Columbus--LGBT state employees are
no longer protected from discrimination by
sexual orientation or gender identity.

Governor John Kasich, who took office on January 10,
allowed his predecessor’s executive order barring
such discrimination to expire.

Neither Ohio nor federal law provides any
protection from anyone being fired because
of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

But an order signed four years ago by former
governor Ted Strickland prohibited such discrimination
against all 60,000 state employees in hiring,
layoff, termination, transfer, promotion, demotion,
rate of compensation and eligibility for training
programs.

It also gave state agencies and universities
the rationale to expand and update their internal
non-discrimination policies, including the
ones covering interaction with the public as
well as employees.

The day after Kasich’s inauguration, when
he would have had to do something to keep Strickland’s
order in effect, spokesperson Rob Nichols confirmed
to the Gay People’s Chronicle that the
order had expired.

Another source close to Kasich said there
will likely be an announcement about the matter,
and possibly other executive orders, “later.”

“You might be surprised by what [Kasich] does,” the
source said.

Earlier, on December 30, Nichols saidthat
the order is “not something we’re looking at
right now.”

A day later, when pressed, Nichols said that
the order had not been discussed.

“There are a couple EOs [executive orders]
which he [Kasich] has said he wants repealed,
but he hasn’t said anything about this one,” Nichols
wrote in an email.

Strickland’s 2007 order restored job protections
that had been dropped eight years earlier by
Strickland’s predecessor, Bob Taft, who let
expire a 1983 order protecting employees from
discrimination by sexual orientation.

The 1983 order was executed by then-Gov. Richard
Celeste. His successor, George Voinovich, allowed
it to remain in effect until 1999 when Taft
took office.

Once Taft’s dropping the order was discovered
and reported by the LGBT press, Taft signed
a new order that did not include gays and lesbians,
nor any other specific group. It declared a
general policy to “prohibit discriminatory
employment practices and to ensure that all
Ohio citizens have equal employment opportunity,” then
recapped federal nondiscrimination guidelines--which
do not include sexual orientation.

Taft spokesperson Scott Milburn told the Gay
People’s Chronicle at the time that the
governor was taking employment discrimination “to
the next level,” because “discrimination
in state hiring practices is a problem not
just for the gay and lesbian community, but
for every person.”

Employment law experts almost unanimously
disagreed with Milburn and called Taft’s new
order “meaningless.”

A few months later, it was discovered that
state agencies and boards were changing their
relationship to their lesbian and gay clients,
even though the clients aren’t state workers.

Most notable was when the Ohio Counselors
Credentialing Board and the Ohio Department
of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services merged
and had to revise their rules.

The combined agency deleted “sexual orientation” from
a set of anti-bias rules that is part of the
code of ethics for chemical dependency counselors.
It was the only change that was made to the
38-page code.

Senior department staff said they were “streamlining
the language” to make it more consistent with
Taft’s.

“We thought it should be in line with the
language used by the rest of the state,” said
department spokesperson Stacey Frohnapfel at
the time.

“Randall Weber, our equal employment opportunity
coordinator, said the [the old statement that
included sexual orientation] wasn’t consistent
and should be changed,” Frohnapfel said.

“Sexual orientation” was only returned to
the rules when lesbian and gay counselors protested,
and Taft issued a memorandum saying the department “misused” his
orders.

Executive orders are not law. They are policy
declarations of an administration which, in
this case, can be the basis for legal action.

Strickland’s order gave any LGBT employee
who believes they were discriminated against
the right to file a complaint with the Equal
Employment Opportunity section of the state
Department of Administrative Services, the
same as for race or religious bias.

Further, the order subjected anyone engaging
in anti-LGBT discrimination to discipline equal
to that of other discriminatory conduct.

But the order “sunsetted,” or automatically
expired, the moment Kasich was sworn in, and
Ohio still has no law protecting LGBT people
from discrimination in employment, housing
or public accommodations. (Twenty-one other
states do have such measures, of which 14 cover
gender identity.)

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